I. Introduction

Chapter 3 of The Art of Living is titled “Responsibility.” Having properly entered into the world of being and the world of moral values through the lens of Reverence and, thereafter, becoming acquainted with the moral attitude of Faithfulness or Constancy, one must, thereafter, exercise himself in accord with moral values in a conscious way. This conscious way or “awakedness” von Hildebrand very much relates to the moral virtues of Reverence and Faithfulness. “Reverence and that true fidelity, which we have called constancy, are closely related to this moral awakedness. Moreover, they can fully unfold themselves only in a morally conscious man.”1

One begins to see the interconnection between moral virtues as von Hildebrand proceeds in The Art of Living. Faithfulness depends on seeing aright or Reverence and both, together, are a part of moral consciousness, which von Hildebrand posits as a pre-condition to an “awareness of responsibility.” This responsibility, in short, acts consciously under “the demands of the world of values.” Such a one “knows that he cannot act freely according to his arbitrary pleasure, that he is not his own judge, but that he must render an account to Someone who is higher.”2 I will return to the further considerations of responsibility, but as is von Hildebrand’s habit, he first sketches examples of the opposite of whatever moral attitude he is treating. The opposite of an “awareness of responsibility” is “the heedless and thoughtless man.” Von Hildebrand sets forth three examples of the heedless and thoughtless man.

II. Three Types of the Heedless and Thoughtless Man

The first is one who does not at all concern himself with the world of values, but acts from mere subjective pleasure. He here describes one closely related to the man who lacks reverence and, thereafter, only asks himself “How will this person or that thing or a particular situation benefit me?” Such a one von Hildebrand calls a “corrupted type” who, although clever in certain pursuits is nevertheless “possessed by an ultimate, a terrible thoughtlessness.”3 One might think here of the insight from Solomon, in which he writes of the wicked, The way of the wicked is like darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble (Prov. 4:19). They do not know what makes them stumble because of the darkness of mind, which may be something like a thoughtlessness.

The second type of a heedless and thoughtless man is the “morally unconscious man.” His problem is not that he does not “grasp values, is affected by them, and sometimes even conforms to them”4 but that he does so in an unconscious, nearly haphazard way. “He is deprived of a conscious and explicit awareness” of the ultimate demand of the world of moral values. He is akin to the one type of an inconstant man, referred to in On Faithfulness, Part II. That is, one type of an inconstant man is he who has certain deeper impressions, but does not call them forward when they are actually needed. Just so, this “morally unconscious man” is one who, when advised, says, “I understand exactly what you’re saying,” but, thereafter, proceeds to act largely in a negligent way in reference to moral values. Such one is the son who tells his father he will go to work in the field, yet does not (Matt. 21:28-32). He is, in a certain way, a tragic figure in a way that the “corrupted type” is not. For to know the good one ought to do, yet to fail to do it, is sin (James 4:17); sin in some higher degree of culpability.

“Finally, there exists a type of thoughtless man who makes a conscious moral effort, but who, on account of a certain superficiality and frivolity in his nature, does not consider it necessary in making his decisions to have a clear and precise notion of the value in question. He does not exert himself.”5 You might think of this type of a heedless and thoughtless man like one who has a natural talent or is otherwise a promising student, yet who for all the natural gifting, does not seek to develop what is inherent any further and so, thereafter, is outpaced by his peers who, for lack of natural talent, exert themselves all the more. Just so does von Hildebrand describe the manner of such one as this in the following way: “Through this lack of a sense of responsibility, the life of such a man actually becomes a sort of game, played out on the surface. So long as this attitude is dominant, the man in question remains immature and childish.”6 He differs from the second type both in his greater grasp of moral values, yet, for that reason, his greater neglect of them in failing to bring them to bear in the determination of certain circumstances of import.

In whatever regard one is heedless or thoughtless, he is not exercising an “awareness of responsibility.” Von Hildebrand’s most piercing insight in this regard is that “in lack of responsibility, in thoughtlessness, there is also evident a lack of respect for reality.” In some way, one is thrown back into the consideration of irreverence, which under-determines the world of being, as I noted of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when he thinks he is saying what a star is because he describes its constituent parts (i.e., that a star is a flaming ball of gas). In lacking a respect for reality, such a one will not rise to the occasion, to put it blandly. He does not properly relate to what one might call his Vocational Duties. A husband who does not seek to lay down his life for his wife lacks a respect for the reality of Holy Marriage, the definition of “husband” and the definition of “wife.” Augustine defines sin as perverse imitation of God7, yet we might also observe that what occasions sin is this lack of respect for what things actually are, for the manner in which God has ordered the world.

In his consideration of the Heedless and Thoughtless Man, von Hildebrand exhibits a degree of sympathy and charity, especially for the second and third types. This is a longer quote, but I think it exhibits the tragedy of such ones to which I referred earlier. Von Hildebrand writes,

The thoughtless man is frightened when he realizes what he has done. His guilty deed is not the result of bad intention, but of a general and blighting lack of comprehension of the seriousness and importance of reality. Lack of understanding of the seriousness of the demands of values, failure to respond to this aspect of the world of values, induces in him a misunderstanding of the import of “reality.” It is is quite understandable that from a frivolous attitude toward reality there will issue decisions formed without sufficient understanding of the demands that emanate from values. Moreover, we find such a man disinterested in the consequences of an action; his attitude is to consider only the present moment. Of course, certain consequences are not always to be foreseen, and certain demands of values are such that they, so to speak, themselves assume the responsibility of possible consequences. But in the majority of cases, we should, before making a decision, examine whether the consequences of our action, as far as they can be foreseen and still more if they are inevitable, are in themselves good or bad. Otherwise, a true interest in values would be lacking. (The Art of Living, 23).

What is sympathetic and charitable is that von Hildebrand holds out the overture that such thoughtlessness is often a result of frivolity, rather than a bad intention. Yet, whatever the thoughtless man intends, the impact of his frivolity, his “blighting lack of comprehension” can often be as disastrous as one who carries out a similar action with actual ill intent. Much can be inferred from the descriptions of the heedless and thoughtless man, but let us turn more explicitly to an “awareness of responsibility.”

III. Awareness of Responsibility

That is, having become aware of the objectivity of moral values and the inherent value of the world of being, armed, likewise, with a constancy intent in comporting one’s life in accord with the demand of values, von Hildebrand bids us to do so consciously, with awareness, as opposed to accidentally or by happenstance. Certainly, we should not let ourselves be governed by desires and the demands of subjectivity, like the first type of a heedless and thoughtless man.

Von Hildebrand, as has been noted, maintains that the “morally unconscious man can be good, faithful, just, and a friend of truth, but only in the sense that he is a pale reflection of these virtues.”8 The seemingly accidental, incidental, or happenstance way such a morally unconscious person is good or faithful or just or a friend of truth is akin to any sort of action that is done absent a certain kind of intentionality or, again, a deeper awareness of the demands of moral values and, in glad agreement with such demands, “a full and free turning to values, a submission to their sovereign majesty, and a real subordination to their eternal laws.”9 Such an attitude of “a full and free turning to values” is Responsibility.

In some sense, the responsible man looks out into the world of being and, noting what it actually is and how that, governing it, are moral values that issue forth from “Someone who is higher than he is”, he simply resolves to cease kicking against the goads (Acts 9:5). What the heedless and thoughtless man needs to come to realize is that there is a definite order in the world to which he is either gladly to conform or, otherwise, suffer the consequence of inconformity.

To make the consideration of responsible action less moralistic or rigoristic or legalistic, recall Solomon’s words about a bird that wanders from its nest. He writes, As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place (Prov. 27:8). So long as one wanders from his place, he will find in such heedlessness and thoughtlessness, suffering that he brings upon himself for his own “lack of respect for reality.” Such a one will no doubt often blame all externalities, which is itself an act of irresponsibility, because of his “blighting lack of comprehension” of the manner in which he often governs himself by his desire and not the demands of moral values.

At root of this awareness of responsibility is the belief, not only in the hard edges of reality, like gravity, for example, against which one rebels to his own peril, but, more importantly, that such moral values do not arise from an “impersonal world” but, again, make their demands through “a personal Judge, who is, at the same time the Sum of all values, and to whom [man] will have some day to render an account.”10 Thus, whereas the first kind of a heedless and thoughtless man is governed by his own desire and subjectivity, the one aware of his responsibility “is far from placing stubborn reliance upon his own insight.”11

IV. To Conclude

Like with the aforementioned moral attitudes, von Hildebrand maintains that “awareness of responsibility is an indispensable presupposition for any true moral life.”12 Indeed, it must be so, for if one is unaware of himself as situated within the world of being under the demands of the moral values from “a personal Judge, who is, at the same time the Sum of all values” it is hard to imagine that one could act pursuant to conformity with such things without such an awareness; or, that one would only do so accidentally, as he stumbles this way and that.

Rather, one is not only to “be guided by the commandments of a true authority”, but, likewise, “be convinced beyond doubt of the superiority of his adviser in the understanding of morally relevant values, and he must clearly understand the legitimate nature of that adviser’s authority.”13 In the context of the Christian faith, such an advisor is God and His Holy Word. One must, again, temper these considerations, noting that while God more than advises through the Law—indeed, He commands, He demands—nevertheless, what is advised does not have the power to generate what is demanded. We might, then, pray the refrain of Augustine, “Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt.”14

What follows was originally presented at a Circuit Winkel (meeting of Pastors) in the inland Northwest in February 2025. It was also published in Cistercian Studies Quarterly, Vol. 60.3, 2025. Note: This was my first attempt at including a recording. At times, there is static, glitches, misreads and bumblings. I think, too, a child’s gleeful scream may be heard. Yet, I hope the recording is helpful.

I. Introduction ~ Aelred, An Exemplar of Sanctity, Charity, and Gentleness

Walter Daniel1 was a Cistercian monastic of the 12th century and personal scribe to and in officio medicus (office of doctor) for a man called Aelred, who was abbot of Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, England from 1147–1167. As Aelred’s personal scribe, Walter wrote a hagiographical biography of Aelred’s life. Of Aelred’s final moments prior to death, when he was called out of this veil of tears and translated to the glory of Jesus Christ, Walter, in The Life of Aelred, wrote:

At the end, with his brothers standing by, [Aelred] said thus: “I have lived with a good conscience among you, for as I lie here, as you see, at the point of death, my soul calls God to witness that never since I received this habit of religion has the malice, detraction, or quarrel of any man ever kindled in me any feeling against him strong enough to last the day in the domicile of my heart.”2

Just so does Walter Daniel describe Aelred as one filled with “charity and astonishing sanctity”3, exemplified principally in the fact that, by all reports, though a firm abbot, nevertheless filled with much gentleness toward those brothers over whom God had given him oversight and care. Constantly did Aelred pray thus, “You know, my Lord, that I do not order them around harshly or out of an overblown sense of my authority. You know how I want to profit them in love rather than preside over them.”4

As a Cistercian abbot, Aelred was bound to the Rule of Saint Benedict and, here, in his expressed desire to profit his brothers, rather than preside over them, he is an obedient overseer overseen, not only by Benedict’s rule, but the words of our Lord Jesus. For so St. Benedict writes, “Let [the abbot] recognize that his goal must be profit for the monks, not preeminence for himself.”5 Moreover, and most importantly, our Lord Jesus says, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:25–28).

There is a fairly high likelihood that you have never heard of Aelred before and might also be wondering what interest, as pastors and leaders of congregations, you should take in a somewhat obscure monastic and abbot of the Middle Ages. My aim in what follows is to introduce you to one who, in his writings and reports made about him, has become to me something of a spiritual friend6, counselor, colleague, and father.

I want to introduce him to you in the hope that your interest may be peaked so as to take up some of Aelred’s works and glean from them consolation, insight, edification, and all manner of wisdom in the leading of Christ’s flocks. In addition, then, that in knowing Aelred–who embodied the fidelity, meekness, faithfulness, gentleness, and firmness of Jesus Christ–you would have another model for your pastoral labor (AC XXI/Ap XXI). While I will offer a list and summary of some of his works in the next section, the majority of my paper will take up the shortest–though most appropriate for our purpose–of his works, Pastoral Prayer, following a brief sketch of Aelred’s life, the brief details of which are entirely owed to essays by Dr. Marsha Dutton.7

II. Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167)

Aelred of Rievaulx was born and “passed his infancy and childhood with two brothers and perhaps a sister in the ancient Northumbrian town of Hexham.”8 Dr. Marsha Dutton notes that “nothing is known of Aelred’s formal education, although the quality of his written Latin and his familiarity with classical, patristic, and medieval writers indicates that he was well taught and widely read.”9 By the age of fourteen or fifteen, he left his childhood land of Hexham and lived at the court of King David I of Scotland, where “for some time he served as the court steward while discerning his life’s vocation.”10 By 1134, Aelred entered monastic life at the Yorkshire Cistercian11 monastery of Rievaulx, which, to that point, had only been extant for two years and was a “daughter house of Saint Bernard’s Clairvaux.”12 Later, of course, by 1147, he would be this monastery’s abbot but, initially, a lowly monk.

He was also born thirty years after the implementation of the Gregorian Reforms (c. 1050–1080), and, though a son and grandson of priests, both named Eilaf and both who served “St. Wilfrid’s seventh-century church in the northumbrian city of Hexham [dedicated to St. Andrew], not far from the border of Scotland,”13 Aelred would not be able to receive holy orders into the priesthood.

In 1074, the western Church imposed clerical celibacy, which was first ignored by priests and laity alike. In response, the western Church forbad sons of priests from becoming priests and so, though Eilaf desired one of his sons to succeed him at St. Andrew, as he himself had succeeded his own father, such would not be the case for Aelred, or his two brothers, Samuel and Aethelwold. However, while his brothers sought to marry, Aelred sought a route available to him in monasticism and so, in this way, carried on into at least a fourth generation, devoted service within the Church. Aelred’s great grandfather, Alfred, was the “sacristan of the cathedral of Durham and guardian of the shrine there of Saint Cuthbert”14, whose remains, alongside the Venerable Bede, are there to this day.

In 1142, “Aelred was named novice master at Rievaulx. Within the year, however, he became the first abbot of Rievaulx’s third daughter house, the Lincolnshire abbey of St. Laurence in Revesby.” Lincolnshire is about eighty miles south of Rievaulx’s position in Yorkshire. Aelred spent a period of five years as the abbot of St. Laurence in Revesby, but, thereafter, in 1147, was elected abbot by the monks at Rievaulx and so he returned to where his monastic life began and would spend the remainder of his life there, called to rest January 12, 1167. Walter Daniel described Aelred’s work at Rievaulx as building “‘the home of piety and peace, the abode of perfect love of God and neighbor,’”15 a goal and hope that ought to obtain in every servant of Christ and steward of Christ’s mysteries.

III. Aelred’s Works

In 1141 or 1142, at the request of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred wrote what is suspected to be the first of his spiritual works, The Mirror of Charity.16 In a letter to Aelred, wherein St. Bernard adjures him to write a work on charity, we read,

I command you, then, in the name of Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God, to the extent that these things have been remarked to you in prolonged meditation, not to put off jotting [something] down on the excellence of charity, its fruit and its proper ordering. Thus in this work of yours let us be able to see as in a mirror what charity is, how much sweetness there is in its possession, how much oppression is felt in self-centeredness, which is its opposite, how affliction of the outer man does not, as some think, decrease, but rather increases the very sweetness of charity, and finally what kind of discretion should be shown in its practice.17

It is possible that this work on charity helped develop Aelred further into the man he had already proved to be at the court of David I. As Walter reports, “There was a certain hard, stiff dolt of a fellow, quite intractable, a military man, at least in name, and certainly strong and cruel enough in his pursuit of evil. He had a mad hostility to the young man, because [Aelred] enjoyed the king’s special affection and was so popular with everybody in the palace.”18 The knight’s internal hatred of Aelred only grew to external clamoring against him, not only in attempts to ruin his reputation by backstabbing gossip, but, likewise, in open rancorous assaults in the presence of other witnesses and, even at one point, in the presence of the King himself. Aelred, whose name, as Walter reports, means Counselor19 sought “not [to] hurl recriminations at the blasphemer, but, with words of pure truth, which deserve enduring record, he met with gentle patience this drunkard in iniquity.”20 Aelred said,

You say well, excellent knight, you say well and everything you say is true; for, I am sure, you hate lying and love me. Who indeed is worthy to fight for King David, or to serve him as he should be served? I know only too well, and hold myself in deep displeasure, that I am a sinner, and have failed much in my service, not to the king whom I serve on earth, but to the King of Heaven. (Life, 93–94).

Though a gentle word does not always turn away wrath (Prov. 15:1), in this case, it was Aelred’s humility in the face of and love toward this rascal that brought the knight to repentance and confession of sin, in addition to promise “to be Aelred’s firm friend in the future.”21 And, in response to the knight’s repentance, Aelred answered,

My brother, I confess that I rejoice with you in your penitence, I am glad and happy with you in your recovery, and I am grateful with you for your affectionate feelings; but I love you and always shall love you much the more because by your hatred I grew in the love of my lord, and because I have become, it may be, a little more pleasing to God in the patience which by this means was stirred and tested in me. (Life, 95).

This entire scene demonstrates what St. Bernard referred to in the above-cited quotation, how that, opposite of self-centeredness, which brings oppression to oneself, there is a sweetness in the possession of charity. So, Aelred titles Chapter 3 of book II of The Mirror of Charity “By its tranquility, charity tempers everything that happens; by its perversity, self-centeredness corrupts everything” and he goes on to explain how that charity or love “will transfer everything that happens to it into its state of tranquility, not permitting itself to be upset by any disturbing event, but forcing the very changes of events to contribute to the benefit of its progress.”22

But if a mind is habituated to the very heavy yoke of self-centeredness its lax restfulness disguises itself as long as there is no occasion for agitation. But as soon as some cause for indignation arises, the savage beast soon bursts from the recesses of the heart, as if from a deeply-hidden cavern. By the dreadful gnawing of the passions it tears and bloodies the poor soul, allowing it no time for peace and rest. (Mirror, 167).

Perhaps it is the case–though this is pure speculation–that Aelred had the poor knight in mind when he wrote this portion of his treatise on love, showing how charity pities and seeks to help even those who have become vicious enemies. In any event, it is an insight for pastors who seek not only to maintain tranquility under the burden of the Office, but, likewise, to help those burdened with self-centeredness to see the plague such a state really is for them and those they affect by the poor manner self-centeredness produces.

“Over the next twenty-five years [Aelred] wrote at least six other works of spiritual and monastic direction, seven historical and hagiographical treatises, many sermons, and, according to Walter Daniel, hundreds of letters, most of which are now lost.”23

The most famous of these works is Aelred’s dialogue Spiritual Friendship, which he wrote after reading Cicero’s Amicitia. Aelred reports that, as a boy, “Cicero’s On Friendship fell into my hands. Immediately it seemed to me both invaluable for the soundness of its views and attractive for the charm of its eloquence.”24 But, of course, Cicero’s work was missing Christ Jesus, and friendship, says Aelred, “should begin in Christ, be maintained according to Christ, and have its end and value referred to Christ.”25 “Cicero was ignorant of the virtue of true friendship, since he was completely ignorant of Christ, who is the beginning and end of friendship.”26

Aelred also wrote works titled Treatise On the Soul, On Jesus at the Age of Twelve, Rule of Life for a Recluse, Sermons on the Prophetic Burden of Isaiah, The Life of Saint Edward, King and Confessor, Lives of the Northern Saints and many others. If you want to know more about Aelred, Dr. Marsha Dutton recommends a biography by Aelred Squire titled Aelred of Rievaulx: A Study. Otherwise, again, I encourage you to encounter the man himself and, if in no other work, than the one of particular interest here, Pastoral Prayer.

IV. For Your Own People: Aelred’s Pastoral Prayer

Though the shortest of his works, Aelred’s Pastoral Prayer is a source of insight, comfort, exhortation, and encouragement for the labor of shepherds in the Church. It demonstrates reliance upon Christ, the Good Shepherd, self-awareness of weakness, inability, and insufficiency in the honorable labor of oversight (1 Tim. 3:1), humility before God and man, and the mind of Him Who came not to be served but to serve.

Marsha Dutton observes, “No one knows when Aelred wrote [his Pastoral] Prayer. For the most part his words sound like those of someone undertaking a new set of responsibilities, both desiring to carry out the role Jesus has given him and anxious about his ability to do so.”27 It seems to me to bear the marks of the self-examining conscience of one who has been laboring for some time, and Dr. Dutton does note some internal references that “may indicate that Aelred was writing in old age, having grown into a love for his community.”28 At the same time, Walter Daniel, in his record of Aelred’s response to the aforementioned scurrilous knight, helps us to see that, even then, working in the court of King David I, Aelred demonstrated great restraint, humility, self-awareness, and charity. In any event, it is a prayer written by one who had charge over the care of other Christians. If he was a young abbot, it demonstrates what Elihu said, namely, that it is the Spirit in a man that grants understanding (Job 32:8), but if he was an old abbot then we learn to take counsel from the experience of the faithful overseer.

Pastoral Prayer begins O Bone pastor Iesu, O Good Shepherd Jesus, referencing our Lord’s words in John 10. Aelred recognizes that the Lord Jesus is the highest good or the highest ideal of what the labor of shepherding looks like and is to be such in the case of those called into the office of undershepherd. In the case of the Good Shepherd, it looks like a willingness even to labor unto death for the sake of those He came to save. And so, the abbot and, indeed, all pastors, are called, not hirelings–who, when they see the wolf coming, run away, abandoning the flock–but shepherds, who remain with the flock of God and do not abandon them. But such, of course, cannot happen on the strength of one’s own strength, so, in the labor of oversight, one must rely entirely upon the Chief Shepherd and overseer of our souls. Aelred identifies this Good Shepherd further as “merciful shepherd, loving shepherd.”29 His opening paragraph is,

O GOOD SHEPHERD Jesus! Good shepherd, merciful shepherd, loving shepherd, to you a shepherd now cries, a poor and pitiable shepherd. Though without strength, though without skill or experience, though without anything at all to offer, he is nevertheless the shepherd of your sheep, such as he is. To you, I say, O Good Shepherd, he cries, this no-good shepherd (non bonus pastor). To you he cries, worried about himself, worried about your sheep. (39.1).

Clearly, Aelred takes Christ Jesus to be the Good Shepherd and one to emulate, but, of course, Christ the Exemplar both comforts, yet also accuses the conscience of one aware of his own infirmities. Thank God He is merciful and loving. But there is also a sense in these opening words of the objectivity of Aelred’s position, for of himself he writes, “He is nevertheless the shepherd of your sheep, such as he is.” This, in other words, is a sure and certain thing, even as the Call (rite vocatus) of the Pastor assures him of his place. Yet, this causes Aelred consternation demonstrated in these words,

Though I have far too little concern for myself, you bid me to be concerned for others; though in every way I lack what it takes to pray for my sins, my own sins, you bid me pray for others; though I myself am far too untaught, you bid me to teach others. Wretched me! What have I done? What have I undertaken? What have I agreed to? (41.3).

Then, averting his eyes from his own decision to become an abbot, he unfolds the reality of the matter and, with candor, says, “Then again, sweet Lord, why have you agreed to this wretch? I beg you to tell me this, sweet Lord: is this not your family, your own people…Why, then, font of mercy, why would you want to entrust such people, so dear to you, to someone cast so far from your eyes?”30

If such a question is not rattling around in a pastor’s head on a fairly regular basis, I do not think he is trustworthy. For even as we must come to the Word empty so as to be filled up, so we must be expended of all self-reliance and, full of trembling at the thought that our gracious God would put such a precious treasure into our feeble hands. With a question, Aelred confesses, “What is more dangerous to subordinates than a stupid and sinful superior?”31 Such piercing questions must characterize at least one part of the interior life of all pastors so that we continually see our flocks as Christ’s, Who would care for them through feeble instruments–through vessels of clay–so that the surpassing glory would belong to Him alone (2 Cor. 4:7).

Why has Christ entrusted the precious treasure of eternal souls into the feeble hands of men? Aelred wonders whether or not it is so that he might be more severely accused and punished for his own sins and those of others. Thereafter, he calls to mind reasons “more worthily believed,” asking,

Did you appoint such a one as me over your family to manifest your mercy and make your wisdom known? To reveal excellence as proper to your power and not of human origin? Or perhaps it pleased your graciousness to have someone like me guide your family well, that I might not glory like the wise in their own wisdom, or like the just in their own justice, or like the strong in their own strength? For when such as these guide your people well, is it not you who guide rather than they? Yes, yes, not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory. (43.3).

The questions may never be answered on this side of glory. Nevertheless, he rests in this fact, “For some good reason you have placed me–or rather let me placed–in this office, unworthy sinner that I am.” And, thereafter, abandoning himself to this good, merciful, and loving Shepherd, he says simply “Set your eyes upon me and turn your ears to my prayers.”32

Because the Lord Jesus is good and merciful and loving toward all, forgiving all, the undershepherd must also take this consolation to himself, demonstrated in his willingness to confess, rather than to conceal, his weaknesses and faults. Self-deprecation–as Aelred exemplifies routinely–is not to be deployed for mere rhetorical effect or for humor or to garner favor, but arises out of a heart that knows itself, yet knows Christ’s mercy all the more. Aelred writes that he would not want to conceal his sin from Christ’s eyes, even if that were possible and reflects,

Woe to those whose will it is to be hidden from you! For that makes them not unseen by you but rather unhealed and unpunished by you. Look upon me, sweet Lord, look upon me! I place all my hope in you loving tenderness, O most merciful, because I know that you will look upon me either as a loving physician who will heal me or as a most kind teacher who will set me straight or as a most indulgent father who will pardon me.

This, then, is what I ask, O font of loving tenderness, trusting in your most almighty mercy and your most merciful might (confidens de illa omnipotentissima misericordia tua et misericordissima omnipotentia tua): that in the power of your name, that sweetest of names, and by the power of the mystery of your sacred humanity, you forgive my sins and heal the feebleness of my soul, remembering your goodness but not remembering my ingratitude. (45–47.5).

The undershepherd must know his own sins and, more importantly, know the mercy of Christ Jesus, otherwise he will be incapable of setting forth the Law aright, using it rather as a bludgeon, than the first part of healing infirmity. For the infirmity cannot be healed by the Gospel unless it is first brought to light through the Law. But if there is no clear sense that the overseer is to bind up and forgive even as he has been bound up and forgiven, he will lack the very goodness, mercy, and love whereby he himself stands through Christ.

The pastor needs not only self-awareness and the forgiveness of sins, but, thereafter, wisdom; wisdom to know God bids you “to profit rather than preside over”33 the people you serve; wisdom to say and believe with Aelred, “You know, my Lord, that I do not order them around harshly or out of an overblown sense of my authority. You know how I want to profit them in love rather than preside over them, to be placed in a humble position below them.”34 Below them, not in actual order, but in my self-estimation of my place. The pastoral office is an authority in the Church, but it is not to be wielded so as to lord over (1 Pet. 5:1–5); one is not to have an overblown sense of his authority, but to have no sense of it would result in failing to do what Christ requires of his undershepherds. So, for this wisdom Aelred prays,

My God, you are well aware of my stupidity, and my weakness is not hidden from you. And so, sweet Lord, I ask to be given not gold or silver or jewels, but rather wisdom so that I may know how to guide your people. O font of wisdom, send her forth from the throne of your glory so that she may be with me, toil with me, work with me, speak in me, and bring my thoughts and my words, all my undertakings and decisions, into harmony with your good will, to the honor of your name, for their progress and my salvation. (49.6).

That wisdom imparted to Aelred summarizes the pastoral labor well when he says, “May I find happiness in being utterly spent for them.”35 For, in utterly spending oneself for Christ’s own people, does not the pastor, then, exemplify the One he serves? And, the utter spending of Himself on the Tree of the Cross is where Christ embodies the wisdom of God, which the world does not understand.

Let it be done in this way, my Lord, let it be done in this way! All my feeling, all my speaking, all my rest and all my work, all my action and all my thought, all my success and all my hardship, all my death and all my life, all my health and sickness–all that I am, all that gives me life, all that I feel, all that I discern–let all this be expended upon them in all its entirety and entirely spent for their benefit, for the benefit of those for whom you yourself did not consider it unworthy to be utterly spent. (49.7).

With this prayer for wisdom, Aelred turns from self-examination and pleading for himself–though some of that is intertwined in the remainder of the prayer–to prayers for Christ’s people. He only prays for himself for the sake of his brothers, and so, even in seeking his own good, Aelred does so for their sake. He prays, “Through your indescribable grace, O Lord, enable me patiently to support their weakness, to have compassion on them lovingly, and discerningly to help them.”36 He prays, “Our God of mercy, hear me–for their sake! I pray to you for their sake, compelled by my duty of my office, urged on by my attachment to them, yet quickened with joy when I contemplate your kindness.”37 He prays, “Make me, your servant, the dependable dispenser, the discerning distributor, the prudent provider of all that you have given.”38 For many other things does he pray, at which we have no time now to look.

V. To Conclude

Aelred’s Pastoral Prayer is brief and, in some ways, quite simple, yet it is also a mine out of which the pastor can harvest much insight for his own ministry. At the conclusion of his prayer, Aelred says something that I count to be the best of his insights. He writes, “I am your servant and, because of you, also theirs; grant them the grace to trust me always and to feel that what I am doing is to their advantage. Let them love and respect me as much as you think is beneficial for them.”39 The pastoral office is owed respect and honor (1 Tim. 5:17) and it is not to be despised (1 Tim. 4:12; Tit. 2:15), which is the command of God’s Word, not for the personal advantage of the office’s incumbent, but for the advantage of God’s own people (Heb. 13:17).

Aelred does not desire to be a people pleaser, for that would mean to cease to be a servant of Christ (Gal. 1:10), yet, he also wants the affection and respect of those he serves in the measure that God deems beneficial for them so that those in Aelred’s care can receive Christ’s labor through this poor, pitiable, no-good shepherd. The pastor must resist a desire to be liked as a matter of personal preference, yet he should pray that God would impart the needed love and respect toward him that will allow the recipients of the ministry to hear the Gospel and be edified by the labor that Christ does in their midst. The pastor, in other words, is concerned about the love and respect of the people he serves only so far as that love and respect terminates in Christ Jesus, the Good and Merciful and Loving Shepherd of the sheep of Christ’s pasture. So, he concludes,

I, however, entrust them into your holy hands and to your loving providence, in the hope that not even one of them will be snatched out of your hand or out of the hand of your servant to whom you have entrusted them, but that they may persevere joyously in their holy intention. By persevering may they obtain everlasting life. Grant this, our sweetest Lord, who lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.40

…should in many ways be immaterial to you. In fact, this article will not concern itself with this question at all and is shameless Click Bait to rather draw attention to a strange phenomenon. That is, when various occurrences, from war to situations that are really local issues, get magnified and summon Man’s attention, one of the first things to proliferate are Reaction Videos. And, in many instances, one of the first thoughts to occur to consumers of information is, “I wonder what so-and-so will say about this.” It is a kind recurring Pavlov’s Dog experiment. Event X happens, which triggers the mind to think of consuming reaction Y.

‘Reactor’ is a new occupation. Though, of course, it has its counterpart in News Anchor, Column Writer, Cultural Critic, etc. Yet, there is an immediacy, a rate of pace, in the case of Reactor that far outpaces News Anchor, Column Writer, and Cultural Critic. What’s more, our Reactors have earned their pedigree with a lot less effort. We have in the Reactor monetized what most people do in the privacy of their own self-talk or around the table with family or in the pub with friends. That is, we have monetized and turned quick-response, from-the-hip reactions into a pursuit by which many make a living. This is not content that has been produced by way of concerted study, reflection, restraint, and sober-mindedness, but is akin to grocery-aisle gossip.

And, there is as much demand on those who consume reaction content to attend as there is on those who create it to feed the attenders. It is common to have content creators say, “My audience wanted me to react to thing X” or “respond to thing Y” and such responses serve as something of a by-pass for consumers of such content to keep from deeper considerations about various things beyond how a Reactor reacts.

Thus, what is more, it is not just that we have proliferated gassing off as a reputable way of making a living, but we often form our opinions (with hard edges) from the reactions of our self-selected or algorithmically curated content creator(s). “If they think Y about X, I also think Y about X.” Few would do this having heard their friend pontificate over a pint or having overheard two people discussing prominent issue X in aisle 26 at Walmart. However, if such a one can appear in 1080p on YouTube, with a pipe in his mouth, and kitschy lighting on his bookshelf, he becomes a reputable source for the furthering others from opinions to earnestly-held, though under-informed and under-developed, firm positions.

This seems to me to be a form of infantilization, inasmuch as depending on Reactors often leads us to form conclusions without having to think, without having to wrestle and contend with matters of import. On the other hand, perhaps the Thing of the Day is not really even worthy of our attention, yet we attend because “Oh, man, so-and-so has made a reaction video to X. I have to hear what they think.” Even as a toddler, after a fall, will check the reaction of father or mother and, thereafter, cry if they gasp or, otherwise, get up and continue to play if they calmly say “You’re okay”, just so are we often subject to this reactionary loop, matching the mood and manner of the Reactors we prefer and hardening in a view that we hardly have justification for being so earnest about, given the mode by which we came to such a position.

It is a strange phenomenon inasmuch as we may come to expect our chosen Reactors to react to whatever everyone else is reacting to, even if it is not in the purview of their interest or expertise. And, further, such people who monetize their reactivity are often compelled by the force of money making, content production, audience demand, and many other such things besides that they must simply say something. Because Reactor has virtually become a new occupation, it would not surprise me that many Reactors and consumers of Reactors just assume that their expressed opinion is thought through and properly formed. But this would be precisely the opposite of intellectual reactivity, which is often not thought through and properly formed but hasty in its declarations, as it is in its conclusions.

About newspapers, A. G. Sertillanges writes, “As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable.”1 He recommends retreat to a weekly or bi-monthly chronicle to avoid the continuous and indiscreet assault of the newspaper. How much more continuous and indiscreet is the reactivity of Reactors? The continuity and indiscretion of such things ought to be met with matched energy in avoiding them, especially in this case, given, again that monetized Reactors are basically doing what most of us used to listen to our dads or our friends do in more casual settings. We take Reactors too seriously.

Whereas I mean to draw attention to our hastily-formed views from hastily-made reactions, Sertillanges was concerned with the way in which things like newspapers were stealing time and focus from those pursuing the intellectual life. Yet, there is a connection here, because the hastily-formed opinion is at cross-purpose with the manner in which we should ruminate attentively over matters of import.

I am, once again, in an Irony Spiral because I am reacting to Reactors, but such as it is. You might, in any event, consider what I have written and at least give pause before you search for your favorite Reactors, even as a salivating dog looks for a biscuit after the ding of a bell or a toddler seeks to mirror the manner of father or mother for emotional regulation.

In Part I, I addressed the importance Dietrich von Hildebrand places on faithfulness as a necessary precondition to the pursuit of moral values. Life is filled with constant change. Faithfulness is that moral virtue that allows one to remain constant amidst the “continual rhythmical replacement of one impression, one act, one decision by another and different impression, act, or decision.”1 The faculty of memory, or what von Hildebrand refers to elsewhere as Recollection, is essential in this regard. Memory helps to call forth the deep impressions of the past in the face of a present circumstance or a future possibility.

How can a man grow spiritually who does not firmly adhere to all the values that have been revealed to him, and for whom these values do not become a lasting possession? How could one who is dominated by short-lived, momentary impressions ever succeed in gradual development of his own moral structure?2

For this kind of gradual development, faithfulness or constancy or continuity is required. Yet, we find in ourselves a certain kind of inconstancy, which we also see in others. In the same chapter, von Hildebrand treats the opposite of faithfulness, the opposite of “the persevering man,” namely, the inconstant man, noting that he is of two kinds.

The first kind of an inconstant man is one in whom “nothing ever truly penetrates to their deeper center…they know only the strata of present consciousness. These men are at the same time superficial, deprived of profound life, and any sort of inner “firmness.”3 This one we might call a gaper as opposed to an imbiber of things of import. If the reverent man patiently waits for the world of being to unfold itself such that he might relate to it appropriately, this type of an inconstant man is without any sort of interest, to say anything of patience, when it comes to knowing something according to its inner meaning, in a deeper way. By inner meaning, I refer to what a thing actually is beneath one’s superficial engagement with it.

Lacking the lens of reverence, in addition to the moral attitude of faithfulness, the inconstant man becomes like the one who asks Jesus to help him get his half of a temporal inheritance even as the Lord preached of things of eternal import (Luke 12:4—13). This type of an inconstant man enjoys life, though not in a significant way. Von Hildebrand compares such a one to quicksand. Such a person is certainly not built upon the rock (Matt. 7:24).

The second type of an inconstant man is the one in whom deep impressions exist, but who is incapable of calling such forth when a circumstance requires it. “They are so imprisoned in the present moment that what lies in their deeper strata is unable to carry its true weight; it cannot hold its ground against the power of the momentary impressions. Only when the present, lively impression fades away can the content of the deeper strata again come to light.”4 Such a man is like one who makes a resolve, yet who is incapable of carrying it out when some other interest or distraction arises.5 He is carried away by something present because it is present. “Such people are continually in danger of becoming traitors to themselves or to others.”6

In some way, this type of an inconstant man is in a more precarious situation than the first kind, inasmuch as he constantly risks and does betray deeper impressions and, despite his forceful resolutions to do differently in the future, is ever in danger of falling. “Take heed how you stand, lest you fall,” writes the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 10:12). This is why it is prudent to avoid making hasty resolutions. In Strength in Simplicity, Emmanuel de Gibergues advises “too hastily formed resolutions” are an obstacle to “the habitual sense of the presence of God” which is the “essential foundation for simplicity,” otherwise known as “purity of intention,” doing all things for the love of God.7 This, he warns, leads to “the frittering away of life, leaving you no longer master of yourself; and in an undisciplined life, made up of whims and fancies.”

“Made up of whims and fancies” is a fitting description of this kind of an inconstant man. He may be in the more precarious situation for what he knows, yet there is always hope that in such a man the deeper impression will finally take root. Von Hildebrand is actually quite pessimistic on this point and would disagree with such expressed hopefulness. Thus, he writes, “As surprising as it may sound, inconstant people never change themselves…Even though they really do for a moment recognize their faults, and form the best resolutions, their inconstancy prevents any lasting moral improvement…They give too much weight to every fleeting impression.”8

Of course, it is true that such one can never change himself, yet, we might hope Another may change him. None are finally secure from some degree of inconstancy, for it is in the nature of man to admire, rather than take heed to the way he stands, which comes right before he falls (Prov. 16:18). Here, fesitina lente, we make haste slowly, as the monks used to say, relying always on the Constant Man, even Jesus Christ our precious and saving Lord.

Yet, reliant upon His mercy, we try to walk as He walked, even as a baby eager for his first steps imitates his father, despite his many falls, bumps, and scrapes. For my part, I cannot share the pessimism of von Hildebrand on this point, lest I, thereby, lose hope for myself. Saul is transformed into Paul. Christ forgives and the Holy Spirit renews, though, of course, one must remember that we are to “hold [the Word] fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience” as our Lord says (Luke 8:15). “Faithfulness is at the heart of every true and deep love.”9

In two previous posts I discussed Dietrich von Hildebrand’s insights on moral values, per se, and one moral attitude in particular, namely, reverence. His book The Art of Living addresses several moral attitudes, which, for von Hildebrand, are preconditions to the discovery, acquisition, and maintenance of moral values.

In chapter two, he discusses the moral attitude of faithfulness. He first draws attention to its importance in relation to the moral life writing, “Among the attitudes of man that are basic for his whole moral life, faithfulness is ranked next to reverence.”1 Whereas reverence is that moral attitude which takes seriously the world of being, inasmuch as reverence allows one to see the inner meaning of things and so treat them as they ought to be treated, faithfulness allows one to maintain constant in relation to the world of moral values; to act, as will be noted further, from our deep impressions, calling forth moral values amidst the life of change.

It should be noted here, and in much of the writing of Dietrich von Hildebrand, that he has a tendency to use multiple terms to describe the same concept. Throughout this chapter he freely moves from “faithfulness” to “continuity” to “fidelity” and “constancy.”

He begins by noting a narrow sense in which we can speak about faithfulness, which is not of principle concern in the chapter. Of course, faithfulness in its broader sense encompasses and aids faithfulness in its narrow sense, even as faithfulness in its narrow sense “throws into relief the”2 broader sense. In its narrow sense, “we speak of fidelity toward men, such as fidelity to a friend, marital fidelity, fidelity to one’s country or to oneself.”3 Here the focus is upon faithfulness acting outwardly. In its broad or large sense, faithfulness is that moral attitude “that first gives to a man’s life its inner consistency.”4

Von Hildebrand notes how that we live in a world that is always changing. “The course of man’s life contains a continual rhythmical replacement of one impression, one act, one decision by another and different impression, act, or decision.”5 This is not a positive or negative statement regarding the nature of change, only that it is the case. Such rhythmical changes characterize our lives, it is to say, even our spiritual life. The problem is not change itself, but whether or not, given a particular change, the deeper impression made by a moral value will be realized in “a super-actual way”6 when the need for it arises. This depends upon the aforementioned “inner consistency,” which, again, is faithfulness in its broad sense.

As an illustration of a failure of faithfulness or constancy as defined by von Hildebrand, take the Apostle Peter. As our Lord approached Jerusalem, He declared that all the Apostles would abandon Him. Peter, affected deeply by the moral value of responsibility7, responds, Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away (Matt. 26:33). The judgement of Charity demands we believe Peter’s earnestness. That is, he actually meant what he said. Nevertheless, at the very moment where responsibility and courage were called for, Peter became one type of the inconstant man: Then he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, “I do not know the man.” (Matt. 26:74).

“We say of many men that they live in the moment only,” writes von Hildebrand, “the present instant has such power over them that the past, even though its content be deeper and more important, vanishes before the insistent clamor of the present.”8 Such was the case for Peter, as it often is with us. Think, too, of the repeated revolving door of an addict who realizes he has a problem. The deeper impression is that he has a problem, yet when the substance of addiction is in front of him, the deeper impression evaporates. Constancy is weak if not non-existent in the sow who rolls again in the mud or the dog lapping up his vomit (2 Pet. 2:22).

What is involved in the moral attitude of faithfulness? The ability to recall. “Memory is an expression of this capacity of the soul for superactual life, and this continuity (i.e., faithfulness) is seen in our capacity to remember, to connect past and present.” Von Hildebrand writes about this at greater length in chapter six of Transformation in Christ titled “Recollection and Contemplation.”9

Interestingly, the monastic, Aelred of Rievaulx, locates man’s ability to share in God’s eternity in man’s capacity for recollection, in man’s memory. Thus, Aelred writes,

The author of all natures inserted in this creature (man) three things that allow it to share his eternity, participate in his wisdom, and taste his sweetness. By these three I mean memory, understanding, and love or will. Memory is capable [of sharing God’s] Eternity, understanding his Wisdom, and love his Sweetness. By these three man was fashioned in the image of the Trinity; his memory held fast to God without forgetfulness, his understanding recognized him without error, and his love embraced him without self-centered desire for anything else. And so many was happy.10

I think von Hildebrand would approve of the statement “memory held fast to God without forgetfulness” because, in many ways, this is precisely what the moral attitude of faithfulness is. This capacity to remember connects past and present and, of course, remembers the One from and upon whom we have both the world of being and all moral values. We exercise faithfulness or constancy when we recollect past, deep impressions, in present and future circumstances, calling such impressions forward in a contest involving threats to moral values. This is why von Hildebrand says that faithfulness “gives to a man’s life its inner consistency, its inner unity.”11 “Without this capacity for continuity, man would have no inner unity; he would be but a bundle of interwoven impressions and experiences.”12 He would, then, only be constant in repeated acts of mutual exclusion, that is, consistent in his inconsistency.

Inconstancy—as it falls prey to a present circumstance because it is present—makes this inner unity impossible. Inconstancy, over against perseverance, is of two types. These will be considered in part two of “The Art of Living: On Faithfulness.” For now, ruminate on memory or recollection and its relation to constancy; how that memory’s capacity to contain God, inasmuch as one act of recollection puts us into remembrance of Him, thus drawing us coram Deo, assists in calling forward a deep impression of a moral value at a time when it is needed so that we can better avoid falling prey to the moment.

In a previous post, I wrote about the place and importance of moral values as expressed by Dietrich von Hildebrand in the first part of the first chapter of his book The Art of Living. In this same chapter, von Hildebrand elucidates the moral attitude of reverence, which will be briefly considered in what follows.

Von Hildebrand writes,

Only the man who can see beyond his subjective horizon and who, free from pride and concupiscence1, does not always ask, “What is satisfying for me?” but who, leaving behind him all narrowness, abandons himself to that which is important in itself—the beautiful, the good—and subordinates himself to it, only he can become the bearer of moral values.2

Reverence is about seeing aright and “it enables the spiritual eye to see the deeper nature of every being.”3 Reverence is, therefore, “the attitude that can be designated as the mother of all moral life, for in it man first takes a position toward the world that opens his spiritual eyes and enables him to grasp values.”4

There is, to some extent, an echo of C. S. Lewis’s observation that a thing can only be properly judged when we correctly understand the end or purpose for which it exists, the goal for which it was made. In his Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis writes,

The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them.5

Von Hildebrand would heartily agree with this, but he would also add this insight: “In order to know what any thing is in itself, one must possess the moral attitude of reverence as a necessary precondition for proper knowing.” For, again, reverence is required in order to see the world of being as important in itself, as possessing inherent value by virtue of its existence over against not existing. Further, every individuated thing within the world of being has inherent value, and reverence allows us to penetrate the inner meaning of things. Or, as von Hildebrand puts it, reverence “leaves to being the space it needs in order to unfold itself.”6 Thereby, one comes to see that “there is a value inherent in every stone, in a drop of water, in a blade of grass, precisely as being, as an entity that possesses its own being, which is such and not otherwise.”7

“Which is such and not otherwise” is an insight that von Hildebrand applies to human beings in particular. Thus, in the chapter titled “Goodness”, he writes,

But the person as a whole must stand before us as endowed with a sublime value and filled with intrinsic preciousness; yes, that specific individuality that every man represents as a unique thought of God must reveal itself before our eyes in all its charm and beauty if we are to love him.8

In other places, von Hildebrand refers to the Unrepeatable Individual and notes that because of the inherent worth of each individual human person, and the way that each individuated person is utterly unique and, therefore, unrepeatable, we do not treat mankind in the same way that we treat animal species.

In the animal kingdom, one is concerned principally with a species as a whole, rather than each individual creature within that species. But when considering mankind, one makes the reverse consideration, over against all collectivist ideologies. To put it in conservationist terms: When applied to the animal kingdom, the concern is the conservation and preservation of an entire species, which, in the end, benefits individual creatures within that species. However, when applied to the human realm, the concern is the conservation and preservation of the individual, which, in the end, benefits mankind as a whole; or, if one likes, benefits mankind within a particular nation or realm. When this is reversed in the human realm by those who promise utopia, it inevitably leads to dystopic hell.

In any event, the overall point is that when one considers the world of being through the moral attitude or the lens of reverence, he is able to see that things possess their own being, “which is such and not otherwise.” Therefore, the world of being demands to be taken seriously and, in addition, treated properly according to what each thing demands according to its purpose properly understood.

What hinders this seeing? If reverence is the moral attitude that allows one to see properly, what are the corresponding attitudes that mar our vision? As noted above, for von Hildebrand, the culprits are pride and concupiscence9, which traduce the objective world of values and make a man relate to the world of being in a purely self-centered, self-interested, and self-serving way. Whereas reverence “is the basis for all moral conduct toward our fellowmen and toward ourselves” the prideful man or the concupiscent man only asks “How will the world of being—how will my fellowmen—benefit me and my interests?” That becomes the sole consideration, which, in the end, does not treat others and things as they ought to be treated, but simply uses things.

Of irreverence caused by these two bad moral attitudes and those possessed of pride and concupiscence, von Hildebrand writes,

Irreverence can be divided into two types, according to whether it is rooted in pride or in concupiscence. The first type is that of the man whose irreverence is a fruit of his pride, that of the impertinent person. He is the type of man who approaches everything with a presumptuous, sham superiority, and never makes any effort to understand a thing “from within.” He is the “know-it-all,” schoolmaster type who believes that he penetrates everything at first sight, and knows all things ab ovo10...The other type of man who lacks reverence, the blunt, concupiscent man, is equally blind to values. He limits his interest to one thing only: whether something is agreeable to him or not, whether it offers him satisfaction, whether or not it can be of any use to him. He sees in all things only that segment that is related to his accidental, immediate interest. Every being is, for him, but a means to his own selfish aim.11

Because pride and concupiscence mar proper vision, the world is finally “flattened” for such ones as are possessed of them. If every thing or person in the world of being exists in relation to me in a purely subjective way, then, by definition, the entire exterior world is flattened out as serving this singular, selfish aim. “If it does not serve my purpose or please me, it is useless,” such one concludes. He is not at all able to see that things are deemed useless because of the fact that the considerer is not considering them in a proper way. Things are flat and shallow because the man himself is flat and shallow. 12It is as Chesterton observed: There are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people.

If the irreverent man determines a person or thing does not serve his interest or pleasure, he tosses it aside. The irreverent man “fill[s] the world with his own ego” such that “the world is flattened before his impertinent and stupid gaze; it becomes limited to one dimension, shallow and mute,”13 though, of course, never in itself, but only in the bent subjective stare of this darkened beholder. “[The irreverent man] also is shortsighted, and comes too close to all things, so that he does not give them a chance to reveal their true essence.”14 He does not stop to consider the true telos of anything in the world of being, but by way of “perpetual egospasm” forces everything to serve his own ends, which are very likely at odds with the final goal of the persons and things such one tries to force to his own way.

In acting with irreverence—with pride and concupiscence—such a one becomes the deteriorator of persons, things, and community, yet, thereafter points the finger of blame at the world of being for not serving his ends. Thereby, he mars his vision all the more and is never able to see other things or, most devastatingly, he is never able to see himself aright.

Reverence for our neighbors is the basis for all true community life, for the right approach to marriage, the family, the nation, the state, humanity, for respect of legitimate authority, for the fulfillment of moral duties toward the community as a whole and toward the individual members of the community. The irreverent man splits apart and disintegrates the community…Wherever we look, we see reverence to be the basis and at the same time an essential element of moral life and moral values. Without a fundamental attitude of reverence, no true love, no justice, no kindliness, no self-development, no purity, no truthfulness, are possible; above all, without reverence, the dimension of depth is completely excluded.15

To state it very simply: reverence regards understanding one’s place as a creature in a world of created things, understanding that each individuated person or thing or community exists independent of you and for its own particular goal or aim. It is about respect for the world outside your own self, yet also about respect for yourself, considered through the fact that Another, namely the True God, has made the world and ordered it, and every single thing in it, in a particular way.

Such things—all things—then demand to be treated according to their purpose or the end and reverence is that moral attitude that first seeks to discover what such an end is, so that one might interact with the world of being in a proper way. “The man who possesses reverence knows that the world of being is greater than he is, that he is not the Lord who can do with things as He likes, and that he must learn from being, not the other way around.”16

I do not assign telos to the persons and things in the world of being. God has already done that and reverence takes delight in this fact. Irreverence attempts to assign telos to the world of being in such a way that it all serves one one-dimensional end, namely, the demand of the irreverent. And, though it is the case that the end of the world of being is to glorify God, yet each person or thing does so in its own way, as God has given it to do. As man seeks to discover this—as he reverently waits for such things to be disclosed to him—he participates together (though in his own way) with the rest of the created world, singing a doxology of praise to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In this, and subsequent posts titled “The Art of Living,” I will summarize the chapters of the book by the same title1, written by Dietrich von Hildebrand2. It is a work on moral attitudes and is something of a digest of von Hildebrand’s larger work on the same topic titled Transformation in Christ: On the Christian Attitude.3

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s little work, titled The Art of Living, is a book on moral values or moral attitudes. These, in Chapter One, titled “Reverence”, von Hildebrand writes,

are the highest among all natural values. Goodness, purity, truthfulness, humility of man rank higher than genius, brilliancy, exuberant vitality, higher than the beauty of nature or of art, higher than the stability and power of the state.4

Such positive moral values and attitudes, which, again, are highest among all natural values, “are the focus of the world.” Whereas positive moral values outrank various other skills or natural gifts and are of greater import than the stability of the political estate5, negative moral values are “the greatest evil.”6 It is far worse to eschew positive moral values than it would be to lose an arm, get sick, or even die.

“Moral values are always personal values,”7 writes von Hildebrand. This means that, of creatures on earth God has made, moral values can only inhere in and be pursued by mankind. Brute beasts act instinctually. Thus, one might euthanize a bear for killing a human being, but the bear will not be put on trial in view of committing murder.

Because moral values can only inhere in man, and man is a conscious being with a will, he must “essentially cooperate for their realization.” This realization of moral values in an individual is developed “only through his conscious, free abandonment of himself to genuine values.”8

Genuine values are objective values. Thus, the pursuit of positive moral values—the effort to develop what von Hildebrand calls a “super-actual attitude,” which seems to mean something like whatever one reflexively does—is fundamentally not a question of subjective preference. In other words, von Hildebrand sees the world of values as objective and, as such, set above and apart from man, making demands upon him that he act in regard to them. Just so, von Hildebrand speaks of “the implacable earnestness of [the] demands”9 of genuine values. Again, describing the one who lacks a proper sense of his own responsibility, von Hildebrand writes, “He is not concerned with either good or evil, and takes no notice of the importance of the demands of the world of values, or of the sword of justice that hangs over his head.”10

These genuine values are objective—that is, not merely a matter of individual whim, but are a sure part of reality—because they relate to and are rooted in God. So, for example, when discussing the moral value/attitude of veracity or truthfulness, von Hildebrand writes,

Veracity is the basis for all true community life, for every relationship of person to person, for every true love, for every profession, for true knowledge, for self-education, and for the relationship of men to God. Yes, a basic element of veracity is, in a specific way, its relationship to the absolute Source of all being, God. For, in the last account, untruthfulness means a denial of God, a flight from Him.11

Thus, man is responsible, not just to a set of vague, pliable, for-the-moment and broadly-agreed upon social norms, enforced through community pressure. The world of values or genuine values are related to God and, therefore, are constant and constantly making demands upon man for their realization. Genuine values are more often than not in stark opposition to whatever other values find broad social acceptance. To strive for moral transformation—which “is always within the range of every man”12—is to strive for something more stable and to eschew what constantly changes.

Such men are consequently protected from the tyranny of fashion. A thing never makes a deep impression upon them merely because it is modern, because it is momentarily ‘in the air,’ but only because it has a value, because it is beautiful, good, and true. As a matter of fact, these persons consider that which is more important and has a higher value as itself the more ‘up to date.’ Objects endowed with values never grow old for them, even if their concrete existence ceased long ago.13

The world of values asks man to cease treating the world of being as valuable only in reference to oneself. “As long as he is interested in the question of whether something is subjectively satisfying or not, whether it is agreeable to him or not, he cannot be morally good.”14 Hence, again, there must be an abandonment of oneself to genuine values, at which point one comes to understand “that there exist things ‘important in themselves’15 and which are owed what the world of values says they are owed.

The point of entry to the world of values and the hoped-for realization of them in oneself is the moral attitude of Reverence. I have written about this in The Lens of Reverence or The Proper Way to See, and will do so further in the next installment on The Art of Living. In the meantime, I would encourage you to acquire this work from von Hildebrand.

The following is a sermon preached on the Feast of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents, December 28, 2025.

Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Texts: Jeremiah 31:15–17; Revelation 14:1–5; Matthew 2:13–18. Blessed Sacrament Lutheran Church. Hayden, ID. December 28, 2025.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen+

The erasure of an infant is a most egregious sin. For in murdering infants, one not only violates the Fifth Commandment, but extinguishes from the world those who, when brought to Christ, are greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. Infants are, for us, the primary picture of the righteousness of faith. The righteousness of faith is pure passive; that is, purely receptive. And, what more fitting image is there of the assurance of faith than a sleeping child in the arms of his mother. There, at rest, he is unafraid of the great distance between her bosom and the floor. There, asleep and totally aloof except of her, he is fully confident that she will continue to press him tight and hold him such that he does not fall to the ground; such that he doesn’t know there is a ground he could fall down to.

Just so does the Lord Jesus sing the praises of His Father in relation to such as these, saying, I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes (Matt. 11:25). In the Kingdom of God, wisdom is most evident in the foolishness of the infant.

It is the child who is most receptive–least resistant–to the mysteries of our faith, accepting them, as the cynic might think, naively. Receiving them, as the Baptist may object, too passively (especially in the case of Holy Baptism). There is, of course, a danger with the ease a child seems to have in believing because they may believe in many untrue things. But, then, the danger on the other side of maturation is that we’re liable to disbelieve precisely at those points where we should abandon ourselves to the great virtue of childlikeness, seeing that what is most unbelievable in our Holy Faith ought to be most easily and fittingly believed.

It is for such as these that our Lord interposes when even His disciples would have prevented the crowds from bringing them to Jesus, that He might touch them. These little ones are our examples of what is required for our salvation. That is, that we be brought to Jesus and handed over to Him. Forgiveness, justification, and salvation look just like this, being handed over to Christ, even as Luther describes the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Christian; that is, that He brings us to Christ.

Of course, we have other notions and ideas in our maturated minds that have marinated in the mire of the misdirection of the devil, the world, and our own flesh and have been misled into false belief and other great shame and vice. It is the adult who contrives all manner of other ways to be saved, to be pleasing in God’s sight; who fails to see that it is precisely God’s sight through His own dear Son whereby we would be pleasing to Him if we would, in fact, be pleasing to Him. A child knows the simplicity of this truth or, at the very least, can be taught it and, thereafter, believe it.

We shouldn’t be naive, of course. And we shouldn’t discourage growing up into the full maturity that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Yet, there is a fine line between asking questions to gain deeper understanding and kicking against the goads. There is some rubicon we think all must necessarily cross between childhood that, with a healthy childlikeness, readily believes what it is taught, on the one hand, to the more petulant childishness that becomes more cynical and incredulous in the face of divine revelation. I say we think this is a rubicon that we all inevitably have to cross, or a current out of which we need to swim because, of course, so many of us have swam that way.

Many of us have not matured well and so failed to carry into maturity that greatness of childlikeness. This–childlikeness–the would-be-mature-but-really-most-immature person sees as silliness. So, they abandon in adulthood what they so readily believed as a child. Such one thinks himself very grown up for having abandoned what, before, he was indoctrinated into. Yet, in the stridency of this side of the rubicon, for all the supposed maturation, such one simply becomes the ready student of other teachers–students of the world, students of the devil, the students of their own self-generated and corrupt suggestions–and so are indoctrinated in another direction, in other directions by a worser and crueler set of teachers.

In any event, we also see in the infant and small children the boldness Luther extols in the Small Catechism when instructing us in the Introduction of the Lord’s Prayer. These words, Our Father, invite us to believe that God is our true Father and that we are his true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask him as dear children as their dear father. Yes, there is often an impoliteness in the bold confidence with which children ask–demand–things. Moreso, there is an irritation alive in the one on the other side of a demanding infant or small child.

However, just for a moment, perhaps we can see in them what ought to be alive in us. That is, not only a sense of dependence, but a certainty that the One on Whom we depend will give us what we need when we ask. Perhaps the impoliteness of the small child who screams or cries at the feet of his mother for the food she is trying to finish cooking for him needs to be corrected. But not the impulse to follow her, expecting that good things will come from her. If an infant’s sleep is the passive side of faith, its insistence in getting its needs from father and mother is the example of the activity of faith that, having trusted in the mercy of God, continually depends upon Him for every other good.

There is also joy exhibited by infants and small children that we could stand to learn. Most of us are too drab and pessimistic in our view of things. A child gets more joy from things that end up annoying us than we do in things that ought actually to bring a great degree of joy. There is a lightness–a levity–that children possess, which mostly gets knocked out of them because of those who have lost it. They have a readiness to laugh and to enjoy whatever is in front of them because their vision has not been marred.

Charles Dickens captures this in Ebenzer Scrooge who, before his great change, basically growls at everything. But upon Christmas morning, when he discovers he isn’t dead, we read, “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk–that anything–could give him so much happiness.”

In this regard, too, we need to imitate the child, who simply imitates Wisdom’s way, as said in Proverbs 8: I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in His inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men (Prov. 8:31).

Of course, children can get bored with things too quickly, but they also have a lasting enjoyment of things and, at a very young age, a great enjoyment from repeated things; an endless game of peek-a-boo, the repeated hearing of a funny sound, being tossed in the air, and many other such things. Here, we see expressed by the infant that great exclamation of relief from Jeremiah when he writes, The Lord’s mercies are new every morning (Lam. 3:23); every repeated morning, the same mercies of God in Christ are new, to be enjoyed repeatedly by faith.

You see, in killing the infant, many other things are killed besides. There is a hardening around such ones as do this dastardly, despicable and wicked deed. A hardening around Herod for all his mad folly in trying to kill Christ. A hardening around all those who through techniques more barbarous, as they surely are more barbarous today, or more primitive as they have been in centuries past, kill infants in the womb. The proper infancy or childlikeness–the ability to be turned and become like a child in all the virtuous ways they are extolled–is lost in them; is, perhaps, lost in very many who live in such dark and evil times.

The would-be-mature who scowl upon the ways of children is a lesser kind of this hardening that makes what is best in the child impossible to be at work in those who most need it. But the one who kills the infant may as well be killing Christ again and again and again, for He comes to us first in this way: conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary so that, in Him we would at least learn the greatness of infancy, of childlikeness. He grows up, of course, yet He carries with Him what first He possessed when conceived and born into this world.

For He bears in Himself such a great trust in His Father that He willingly abandons Himself into the hands of sinful man. He believes all that His Father reveals to Him with a readiness, yet is not naive and so eschews all that is false and vain in this corrupt life. He acts with boldness and confidence. Christ is the true lion’s whelp. He goes forward, even to the tree of the cross, with joy. And He ever–that is, repeatedly–is nourished by fulfilling the Father’s will for our sake.

And, another Herod, along with Pilate and a whole host of His own people, visited the same unjust fate upon Him as we heard was perpetrated by an earlier Herod on those we call the Holy Innocents. They remain so, for their innocence and everything that is extolled in children as we have just heard was not lost when they were killed. Thank God, these little ones that belong to Him, who themselves embodied and envisaged to the world the form in which the world’s salvation would come and who also prophesied of Christ’s future fate in their own suffering and death, were finally caught up into God and rest safely, awaiting the vindication of the righteous on the last day.

Let us, dear Christians, turn and become like them. To rest in our Baptisms, knowing that we are Christ’s; that we belong to Him and so be unconcerned about the days ahead. Let us be ever ready and filled with joy to hear God address us, to talk baby talk in the simplicity of the Gospel to His dear Children. With boldness and confidence, let us draw near the throne of grace and demand of the steward that he steward to us the very body and blood of Christ Jesus, in which is forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Let us stare at death and, with childlikeness, see it as it now is in Christ: a rest and a portal to everlasting life. God grant that the infant Christ would likewise be born in and live in us.

Ah, dearest Jesus, holy Child

Prepare a bed, soft undefiled,

A quiet chamber set apart

For You to dwell within my heart.

+To Christ be all the glory. In Jesus’s name. Amen+

On Thursday, we begin a New Year. For those on liturgical calendars, the Church Year already commenced on Advent 1. Many have their resolutions set. Some may have resolved to exercise or eat healthier, with a specified goal to lose a certain amount of weight. Some may have resolved to establish a better pattern for prayer. Still others to endeavor upon that most rewarding exercise and discipline of the reading life. How ought we, as Christians, to think of such endeavors? Perhaps a New Year’s resolution can be framed in terms of sanctification or our Christian Life of Holiness such that we have a proper grasp on both.

In The Quest for Holiness, Adolf Kӧberle observes that “the desire for sanctification is always first aroused in man when he has become conscious, in some painful way, of his lack of peace and the erring restlessness of his life.”1 That is to say, perhaps for many, sanctification, like New Year’s resolutions, are situated on and go forward from guilt or a desire to make up for what has gone wrong. Thereafter, resolutions are pursued to assuage the guilty conscience, seeing what, for the worse, we have become. When it comes to the resolve to lose weight or eat healthier or read more, this may not be so perilous. But in the revelation of one’s own sin, a resolve to set right what you rightly see as wrong and, thereafter, laboring from guilt so as to make up for the mark you have missed, begins off the wrong foot, however well the intention in doing so may be.

Kӧberle thus warns against a “double danger” in how we think of sanctification. “On the one side,” he writes, “is the peril of fanaticism. Here man knows no bounds. He becomes constantly more exalted in his estimate of himself and talks more loudly, confidently, enthusiastically of the stage of sanctification that he has attained.” Again, if applied to certain resolutions, this might just result in one becoming an annoyance to those he is around. We typically get over-obsessed and tell everyone every detail of our eating plan, our gym routine, our progress, or our frustration in failing to keep to our resolve. An annoyance, to be sure, though, perhaps, not dangerous. But in sanctification? Such one “no longer is conscious of the presence of the old man and regards the daily prayer for forgiveness as something rather superfluous.” That is, this may result in a self-reliance that is not only unbecoming, but soul-endangering inasmuch as it forgets Christ.

Yet, there is also another danger; the danger “that makes so little out of the testimony of the Holy Ghost, Who quickeneth us, that we might think Christ had never risen and Pentecost had never happened.” That is, in the place of self-aggrandizement, despair that snuffs out the reassurance and confidence of faith in the propitious death of Christ and His glorious resurrection from the dead. In addition, such a one begins to think that a life of progress in holiness of life is an unattainable ideal. How shall these tensions and dangers be resolved? Kӧberle writes,

As opposed to such views, we seek here, in the manner of the New Testament, to unite such possession and expectation, having and hoping for, present sanctification and eschatological fulfillment on the basis of justifying faith.2

Here, laboring from the basis of justifying faith, we go forward, not from guilt, but from freedom in Christ. That should be the first and continual resolution and, indeed, is the first and ongoing part of sanctification: constantly recalling our freedom in Christ and, thereafter, laboring freely, not under the strain of compulsion, which is both produced by and aimed at trying to put away guilt.

Resolutions are good. We should resolve to and declare our intent to do better, as the penitent says in the Rite of Individual Confession and Absolution. Yet, we should do so having asked for grace and, indeed, resolving continuously to receive it as it comes freely through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Then, when we have the hope of glory, that is, Christ in us (Col. 1:27), yet, more important still, Christ for us in His atoning death and justifying resurrection, we can begin to grow after His image and likeness.

Kӧberle helps one to see sanctification both as an imperative (that which is commanded) and also an indicative (that is, what we are) for Christ is not only our righteousness and wisdom, but, likewise, our sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30). He writes,

The New Testament speaks of sanctification both in the imperative and indicative moods. It is described as a Divine gift and at the same time as a result of our obedient choice. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). This antithesis must be maintained in Christian ethics with the utmost care. Man must be denied all credit but dare never be relieved of his full responsibility.3

As you think on the New Year and have begun to draw up certain intentions for improvement, know that this is a commendable effort. Yet, avoid the twin ditches, as Kӧberle has warned against so as to forget yourself as you strive and, having Christ only, you might labor in love, that is, willingly and freely, being possessed, not of worldly regret that leads to death, but with a godly grief (2 Cor. 7:9-10) that is consoled through the Son of God our Savior.

A blessed New Year to you, dear Christians.

In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researchers were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so.1 ~Anthony Trollope

Through the reflections of the narrator in his novel The Warden, Trollope observed the way in which certain monthly novels2 made the consideration of and reflections upon serious matters more hasty, that is, less carefully and seriously studied and considered. This, of course, inevitably leads to the proliferation of hastily-formed (yet strangely confident, perhaps even strident) conclusions on issues, persons, circumstances, etc., that one otherwise knows very little about.

The unfortunate person negatively affected by such haste in The Warden is the Rev. Septimus Harding, who finds himself as the chief object of ridicule at the center of a conflict between certain parties seeking either to reform the Church of England, on the one hand, or otherwise maintain the status quo on the other. For the purposes of this reflection, the details are immaterial, and wishing to spare the reader from spoilers, I commend the novel to you.3 One need not read the novel to understand and appreciate the concern expressed in what has been cited above.

That is, the removal of even serious matters of concern from grave decorum and laborious argument—from proving a grievance in an age—to that which is quicker, namely, rapidly-formed ridicule ‘proved’ (as it is thought by the one who so proves) in a matter of minutes, hours, or, at most, a few days. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker, writes Trollope. With what lighter steps and the quicker do we now step? In the age of YouTube, Podcasts, Blogs, and Substack4, paired together with an incentive structure that rewards haste and lack of careful reflection, one might well pine for the day of monthly novels. At least the installments would be monthly, which is a very slow pace in the mind of most people today.

I do not take it as an absolute good that certain former structures of the flow of information have deteriorated and decayed; that even such a reflection as I am presently writing passed no other sieve than its author and sole editor (responsible alone, therefore, for all errors of grammar and information). In a former age of grave decorum and laborious argument—to say nothing of the slowness with which things were necessarily produced sans computers and the internet and, therefore, the more slowly considered and ruminated over—the warning and, really, the wisdom of the Lord Jesus was, at least by the circumstances of slowness, easier to heed: But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment (Matt. 12:36).

I suppose it the case that at the time Jesus spoke these words every idle word that men spoke was limited to actual speaking. Few wrote letters. No one had YouTube Channels, Podcasts, Blogs, Substacks, or that platform X, on which one might the more easily shout from the proverbial rooftop every thought whispered in the quiet of the mind. ‘Gate-keeper’ has become a pejorative because of the abuses in the keeping of gates. Yet, abusus non tollit usum (abuse does not remove proper use). Some gates need to be kept5 , yet I offer no insight here in how this is to be done.

In any event, it is at least a start to reflect upon the fact that as hastily as commentary on a range of topics from the Ecclesial to the Political or matters of local concern is set forth, the more hastily do many imbibe it. In my opinion, all are the worse off. Speaking idle words is dangerous in its own right. Inwardly digesting such may very well be the more dangerous. Monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so, writes Trollope. Today, many are convinced by ‘reaction videos’, minimal-character posts on X, or same-day yet long-form comments on the latest thing by Content Creator ‘Y’ because not only are such things produced with rapidity, they are bite-size.

We no more have the patience in producing good argument—rather than mere ridicule—than we do in consuming that which has been hastily set forth. In the day of reduced focus, our learned quartos may very well need to be the monthly novel (though not of the kind Trollope complains). In any event, we ought to direct our attention to things more slowly conceived and produced; things restrained, which do not prey upon man’s inherent draw toward rhetorical ostentation or peddling in ridicule and scuttle-butt; to expect more from those who set forth content for consideration; to expect more of ourselves as we attend to things in the world.

One would benefit from considering the original language of the Collect for the Word as he engages with the monthly novels of our time. That is, we pray that we would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Word of God. Thinking similarly about content engagement will perhaps help, inasmuch as it is good to inwardly digest good things. Good things are almost never hastily produced. It is not an infallible rule that what took a life to write and an eternity to read will be good for one’s digestive system, but there is a greater chance this is the case compared to that which is produced with a lighter step and quicker.

C. S. Lewis writes,

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.6

Here may be a place to start: read something old; something that has endured; something that has come down through the sieve of time, “tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages.”7 Though I’m certain you mustn’t, yet if you feel you must listen to or read the multitudinous array of content creators who are not themselves sieved, sieve them with the best things one can read on topics ranging from the Ecclesial to the Political. And, generally speaking, avoid reading (certainly avoiding believing too readily) reports written about local affairs that your life does not now nor will it ever touch. Each day has enough trouble of its own, and so does the narrow limitation of your own vocational sphere.

In our reactionary age, moderation is a lost, if not a disdained, virtue. It is possible that the virtue of moderation, otherwise referred to as self-control or temperance, is mistaken for what, politically, we might call a Moderate. A Moderate, in that sense, suffers from placing “humility in the wrong place,” as G. K. Chesterton put it. He elaborated further,

Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason.1

When modesty is removed from conviction—which is right and proper because, for the Christian, conviction rests upon God’s Holy Word—then one must balance the tension between conviction (interiority) and manner (exteriority). Refusing to depend upon the force of some truth set forth with moderation, we may well mistake gratuitous bombasity as the evidence that what we say ought to be believed. Refusing to subdue one’s exterior manner when attempting to set forth an interior conviction ends with the same persuasive effect as a resounding gong. In such a case, one has certainly made a sound, but often with ill or no return. How might one properly balance an earnestly held conviction with a properly self-controlled exteriority? With moderation. Some examples will help to illustrate the point.

The Apostle Paul not only evidences the proper execution of the virtue of moderation, but likewise commends the same to Timothy. When, for example, Paul visited the Areopagus he was possessed of a zealous, inner conviction against the multitude of idols he saw. Nevertheless, in his manner toward those pagans with whom he interacted, his exteriority was tempered by the virtue of moderation. Luke writes, Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols (Acts 17:16). The sense of provoked in the original text is the arousal of a strong feeling, sometimes with wrath, anger, or grief.

Interestingly, the only other place the word is used in the New Testament is that section of 1 Corinthians in which St. Paul describes the multifaceted character of love. One of love’s characteristics is that it is not provoked (1 Cor. 13:5). Though love rejoices together with the truth, it is nevertheless not provoked. Thus, Aelred of Rievaulx writes, “By its tranquility, charity tempers everything that happens; by its perversity, self-centeredness corrupts everything.”2 Charity may well be the virtue that aids a man in holding back from asserting himself—aids a man in doubting himself—while self-centeredness makes the assertion of oneself a near inevitability.

Paul was filled with an inner provocation because he did not have modesty or moderation fixed upon the organ of conviction. It may well be considered a virtue today to place modesty on the organ of conviction, but it is oxymoronic to do so. What is a conviction, after all, if you don’t believe it with conviction? For many, the only conviction upon which modesty is not to be placed is precisely that one that asserts we should not hold onto “Divine Reason” with any conviction. For his part, Paul believed the truth about idolatry from the First Commandment. However, through love, which is not provoked, he exercised moderation, refusing to assert himself, which would only get in the way of the truth. Through the virtue of moderation, he eschews that ego-driven3 reaction and calmly, even politely, sets forth an open statement of the truth (2 Cor. 4:2).

In his external manner and address, Paul was generous and charitable to those pagans assembled at the Areopagus. Thus and so he first commends them, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious.” (Acts 17:22). And, with moderated confidence, he finally proclaims to them the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Some mocked him, of course, while others said, “We will hear you again on this matter.” (Acts 17:32). Dionysius the Areopagite was converted and followed St. Paul, along with a woman named Damaris, and others with them (Acts 17:33). There is no saying how it would have gone otherwise, that is, if Paul, through a certain kind of exterior immoderation, asserted himself rather than the truth of what God had done. Be that as it may, we nevertheless have a fine, apostolic example of how to strike a proper balance between conviction and manner.

Additionally, Paul gives this counsel to Timothy, A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth. (2 Tim. 2:24–25). Timothy is to be sure about the truth–immodest, we might say, in his confidence regarding the veracity of what God has revealed–but gentle, patient, and humble to those in opposition whom he corrects. It is not only through the conviction of the truth, but, likewise, restraint in manner in setting it forth, that God will perhaps grant repentance.

Peter’s commendation to the Church could also be included here. He wrote, Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed. (1 Pet. 3:15–16). He adds the consideration of one’s own conscience and good reputation when he commends meekness in giving an answer for the hope that is in us. Thereby, Peter demonstrates that our conscience should be troubled if our manner is not as he prescribes.

Let this consideration of balancing conviction and manner suffice for now. There are predictable objections to this commendation that will be addressed in Part II. For the moment, ruminate on what has briefly been set forth here.

Solomon writes, Happy is the man who is always reverent (Prov. 28:14). What is reverence, that, pursuing or developing it in ourselves we might be happy? In particular situations, many have the sense they should act reverently. Colloquially, we are more likely to appeal to something like politeness, which concerns outward manners. To act with reverence or politeness presupposes a certain interior disposition, as all external acts proceed from some interior disposition. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks, says Jesus (Luke 6:45). And, as the mouth reflects the heart, so it is with other external acts.

Reverence is, then, in the first place, not so much concerned with exteriority, but interiority, which, thereafter, relates properly to the external world. By way of initial consideration, reverence concerns an inward way of seeing what Dietrich von Hildebrand routinely calls “the world of being.” Reverence, then, has to do with what the Apostle Paul refers to as the enlightenment of the eyes of the heart (Eph. 1:18). Such enlightened heart-eyes look out upon the world of being (i.e., the created world), including oneself, and, as it were, behold things and persons according to what they mean in themselves, what they mean according to what they actually are as created by God.

To illustrate the opposite of reverence, consider the interaction between the semi-materialist and Utilitarian Eustace and Ramandu in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Ramandu appears as an old man, but in the course of conversation, the reader finds out that Ramandu is, in fact, a “retired star” or “ a star at rest.” Of Eustace’s reaction and Ramandu’s answer, we read,

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."1

To refer to the component parts of a thing is not yet to relate to it by way of reverence. For a mere reference to component parts does not touch upon what a thing means; what it is in itself or, more precisely, what meaning God has imbued into it.

An abortion doctor can refer to the component parts of the unborn baby he pulls apart, yet for all that stand in a morbid, murderous irreverence in relation to the child, not knowing what, (or, really, who) an unborn child is; what, in other words, the interior meaning of the human person is. And, possessed of an interior irreverence respecting the question of what a person is, what a person means, such a one proceeds to destroy its life.

Irreverence relates to the world of being in a superficial, surface-level way. Of such superficiality, Dietrich von Hildebrand writes,

“Without a fundamental attitude of reverence…the dimension of depth is completely excluded. The irreverent person is himself flat and shallow, for he fails to understand the depth of being, since for him there is no world beyond and above that which is visibly palpable.”2

So, what, then, is reverence? It is an interior disposition, a way of seeing, a clarifying lens, that allows a person to pierce beyond the surface of the world of being and consider its inner meaning. At the risk of putting it in a dimension-less way, one might say that a created thing has properly unfolded its meaning (or, reverence has properly ascertained it), when it declares the glory of God. From the heavens to the human person (Ps. 19:1-2; Ps. 139:13-16) and all things below and in between, reverence recognizes the world of being as God’s handiwork and, thereafter, exists in relation to the world of being according to the meaning God has bestowed upon and imbued into all that He has made.

A righteous man regards the life of his animal, But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel (Prov. 12:10). A man of reverence, in other words, treats even the life of brute beasts with a greater degree of Charity and dignity than does the wicked man the life of his fellow man precisely because a man of reverence governs his relation to the world of being through a proper understanding of himself (the steward of the created world) and the world (that which is to be stewarded or related to). The man of reverence “understands the dignity and nobility of being as such, the value which it already possesses in its opposition to mere nothingness.”3

Reverence, then, is a disposition that relates to all outside oneself as imbued with value independent of one’s consideration of or interaction with it. The world of being, as von Hildebrand observes, already possesses a nobility over against non-existence. Aside from God Himself and the Holy Angels, man is that uniquely created being who “is capable of knowing and grasping the rest of being, and of taking a meaningful position toward it.”4 Of course, such can only be the case for one who possesses or is possessed by reverence; what von Hildebrand also refers to as True Consciousness.5

In other words, if the world of being is possessed of value prior to one’s consideration of it, a man must crucify the inclination to “fill the world with his own ego” and allow “[the world of] being the space that it needs in order to unfold itself.”6 That is, to know “that the world of being is greater than he is, that he is not the Lord who can do with things as He likes, and that he must learn from being, not the other way around.”7

The reverent man is always happy, then, because he relates to the rest of the created world—he perceives even himself—not as a flattened out morass of mere materiality, but as mystery; as being created by the True God, which unfolds its meaning through the proper lens of the enlightened eyes of the heart. These are so enlightened by God’s Divine action of opening them, rescuing them, really, from the darkness of unbelief and impenitence, which not only relates to God improperly, but, thereafter, all that God has made and given as means by which His glory is revealed and declared. The irreverent man disregards grass and flowers, but the Reverent Man makes the flowers and the grass preach against the fickleness and anxiety of unbelief (Matt. 6:28-30).

God grant to us reverence so that we see the world of being anew, filled with His glory.

Sermon Text: James 5:7–10.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen+

The Epistle reading begins with an encouragement: Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. That James writes therefore means that the encouragement to patience is connected with the prior section. There, James excoriates the rich who live in luxury, while they mistreat the laborer, withholding his wage, and likewise mistreat the righteous, unjustly condemning and killing them or otherwise taking them to court.

Be patient, therefore, in view of these injustices, which could stand in for any number of injustices that righteous or innocent people must needs suffer in a fallen world. Be warned against committing them yourself, of course, but be patient if you must suffer them as you await the return of the Lord in glory.

Part of the emphasis of the season of Advent is patient endurance as you continue to sojourn through a world that is often unjust and in which, then, you must suffer. The antiphon of Advent, Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, keeps us in constant reminder that the end of all things, including suffering the things that we must suffer, is yet ahead of us. Our last day most certainly must come to us, writes Guerric of Igny, but it is very uncertain when it will come.1 So, we must wait and in a particular way, with patience.

The better translation for patience here is longsuffering. And, longsuffering entails more than just waiting a long time, enduring a lengthy stretch of discomfort. It also entails safeguarding a humble interiority while you suffer. That is, longsuffering is not just enduring long while being internally angry, frustrated, discontented, spiteful, and desiring to pour out wrath at the first opportunity one is given to do so.

On the contrary, longsuffering or patience entails a kind of interior tranquility; an ability to bear up under provocation without complaint, internal or otherwise; an endurance at the end of which you are willing and able to say of those who cause you to suffer, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, even as our Lord did as He hung upon the tree of the cross.

James, indeed, rebukes those who live in luxury and mistreat those to whom they owe debts, who mistreat those who are otherwise innocent. But he also does the more difficult thing. He also addresses those who have been wronged. And, not just to be a sounding board for their endless complaints, to hear their grumbling; and, not himself, just to vent along with them in the midst of all their frustrations. He addresses them in order to admonish them. Every admonition to virtue has a built in implication. That is, if I have to admonish you to virtue, it is because I’m warning you against the opposite vice and sin.

And, of course, it’s not easy to be admonished when you have been wronged. Often, a wronged person does not want to be told what ditch they are about to fall into through the excess of their indignation. But James, and all faithful preachers of the Word, risk offense in not only correcting those who are in the wrong, but more so admonishing those who have been wronged. For, you can suffer innocently and, thereafter, in your angst, frustration, anger, and suffering fall prey to particular vices and sins. So, we must be on our guard and be warned.

There are worse things that can beset us than those in the world who would treat us unjustly. The devil and our flesh are waiting in the wings to take advantage of such circumstances and turn our innocent suffering to sin through impatience and excess complaint. It is a worse state of affairs to have a ruinous interior life–that is, a life that lacks godliness with contentment–than to otherwise be preserved in faith through the tumult of this world. Better to suffer all manner of external injustices and even be put to death while a proper interior life is maintained than be relieved of suffering but give way to impatience, discontent and grumbling.

James warns those innocent sufferers from turning into the very ones who bring suffering to the lives of the innocent. When you are in close quarters with a particular manifestation of sin the greatest danger is that you will succumb to the same. Leave those who commit injustices against you to their bitter hatred lest you be sucked into their bitter hatred.

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord.

James directs these innocent sufferers to something more significant. It is something far-off, to be sure, but much more significant than whatever worldly, temporal concerns the rich and those who live in luxury want continuously to concern themselves with. That is, after admonishing to longsuffering, James attempts to turn the eyes of faith to the coming of the Lord, at which point what they have suffered will be set right as they are vindicated by Christ and brought into an eternal rest; at which point all the ill-got gain of those who bring suffering upon other people will be taken away from them and restored a hundredfold to the righteous.

What are you suffering, dear Christians? And, more importantly, in what way are you bearing what you’re suffering? With patient endurance, with longsuffering, until the coming of our dear Lord Jesus Christ? Or with corrosive, frustrated and grumbling hearts?

Advent would intervene in such a case to put you in remembrance of the fact that, not only has the Son of God come, securing for us the forgiveness of sins and our salvation, but that Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, in which He will return again in glory and set all things to right. So, be patient.

Meditate upon the patient endurance of the farmer. Consider the hard labor of his hands that precedes the sowing of the seed. Reflect upon how he must wait, not only for the seed to begin producing, but for seasonable weather to come.

Establish your hearts with the eternal promises of God. Christ has done more for you through the shedding out of His precious blood and offers more to you in His everlasting Means than can ever be extracted from you by unjust and lawless men.

The Judge is standing at the door waiting to come in. He will certainly measure out to each according to the measure each has used. He will measure out to the unjust the judgment of strict punishment according to the way they have meted out injustice against the innocent and the righteous. James warns, then, against harsh judgment in preference, by implication, to mercy. In this way, when Christ returns to be our judge, He will be merciful in turn.

Keep in mind the prophets, he says, who not only suffered innocently in their own right, but who continuously set forth the promise of the coming Savior. Our eyes and our ears and our hearts have seen and heard and believed what they awaited and proclaimed. For us, Christ has come in the flesh and, now, we await when He will come in glory. And He will come. That, again, is most certain. So, Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord so that, together, we would gladly receive Him, rejoicing in the joy of our salvation. Be unbothered by those who cause you suffering both now as surely as you will be unbothered for eternity.

+To Christ be all the glory. In Jesus’s name. Amen+

III. Strength In Simplicity

In the first volume of The Life of Jesus Christ, Ludolph of Saxony (d. 1378), 14th c. Carthusian monastic, writes, “If you wonder if any of your actions, interior or exterior, are divine, and whether God is performing them in you, and they are done through Him, ask if God is the goal of your intent. If so, then your action is godly because it has one and the same origin and goal: God.”1 Such a question is what the virtue of simplicity seeks to answer. And, it is the question constantly on the mind of the Christian, “Are my actions in keeping with God’s will?” The reason why certainty can only arise where God “is the goal of your intent” is because, in the end, He is the one to whom our entire life is to be of service.

If simplicity is possible, we must seek after what de Gibergues calls “total self-abnegation.”2 Wherever self is kept alive as a motivation for your labor, simplicity will be lost. What is simplicity, then? It has to do with purity of intention in all that we aim to do. That purity of intention is related to whether or not you have God as your goal or aim in acting. “Simplicity, or purity of intention,” writes de Gibergues, “consists in keeping before yourself, in all your thoughts, words, and acts, one and the same end, one and the same object—namely, the pleasing of God, or more accurately, the doing of His will.”3

This seems obvious, of course, but how difficult it really is. If only we could see the extent to which inward fragmentation in our actions, that is, dividing our intention to please this person/multitude of persons or to prop up our name in that way or to act in spite or labor from fear or sow for hope of praise and reward finally weakens us and expends our energy in useless ways, we would more easily fall back upon this purity of intention. We would hold before ourselves One and the same object, namely, laboring for the love of God. For, in that case, our aim is toward a unity, namely, the One True Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as opposed to a multiplicity, that is, the number of other things we attempt to satisfy as we labor; other things that are, in the end, never satisfied. To do otherwise is to suffer the same effect when trying to multi-task. Multi-taskers end up doing a poor job in multiple directions, giving many things, in the end, terrible effort.

When I was a kid, I was in 4-H and showed pigs and steer at the Kootenai County fair. The goal for showmanship was simple: only be concerned for what the judge thinks and, then, keep your animal between you and him. Of course, as a kid, you are worried about how stupid you look in cowboy clothes that you only wear to show your animal. You are worried about what your friends in 4-H think of you when you walk out into the show ring. You are worried about how your 4-H leader estimates your effort. You are worried if your pig or your steer is going to go nuts now that it is in a bigger pen. You are worried about many things, in other words, and they all distract from the real aim and goal, that is, what does the judge think. In the end, with all this worrying, you don’t place in showmanship because you are internally fragmented, expending energy uselessly.

So, simplicity as a virtue, purity of intention, having God as one’s sole aim and goal must be internally fostered. Dietrich von Hildebrand writes, “The basic error of all false simplicity lies in the assumption that it is a simple thing to have a true simplicity.” “True simplicity,” he also writes, “is more difficult to attain than is complexity.”4

Again, you would think it the opposite, inasmuch as simplicity concerns One object of our devotion, whereas complexity concerns many different objects. But the flesh is weak and stupid to boot. We actually convince ourselves that the Christian life would be easier if only we can placate all the demands made upon us by everything else besides or even in addition to God. In the end, we become like a guy trying to balance several spinning plates on sticks. “True simplicity is more difficult to attain than is complexity” because our fundamental issue is a lack of trust in the One Who has called through His dear Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is not to say we only do one thing all the time. Just as God is both unity and multiplicity, a Tri-unity of Persons, so, too, do we do many things all the time, yet, ideally, with a singular intention: to please God.

Von Hildebrand is right when he says, “This simplicity is defined by the inward unity which our life assumes because we no longer seek for any but one end: God.”5 Yet, the attainment of that single-hearted devotion to God is not at all easy for us. It is perhaps because we are afraid to die; we are afraid of what abandoning self-reliance will ultimately result in, not only for ourselves, but for our families, and many other such concerns besides. But there is a strength in the single-hearted devotion to God, the total self-abnegation referred to earlier, the erasing of one’s will as the determiner of circumstances you are facing in preference to the will of God. It is for the abandonment of simplicity—the abandonment of purity of intention, of acting for the love of God—that we exacerbate situations and ourselves.

IV. Conclusion

In the Large Catechism, Luther writes, “Only”—one might say, simply—“do what is your duty, and let God take care how He is to support you and provide for you sufficiently. Since He has promised it, and has never yet lied, He will not be found lying to you.”6 I say this to my kids all the time: Simply do what is your duty. I try to help them understand that when they attempt to take to themselves what is not actually their sphere of concern and responsibility, all it brings is suffering. When we abandon simplicity, we act like children who try to assume the role of father or mother in parenting their siblings. We look foolish, and we suffer besides.

Inclining toward the virtue of simplicity is, like all things in the Christian life, a good struggle. Inward complexity, a divided devotion, a fragmented labor is, indeed, much easier because the devil so effectively lies and our flesh so gladly believes the banality of his repeated convincings that if we only try to please in multiple, rather than in one direction, things will go well for us. It is never true, yet we are as Wiley Coyote and will, without a doubt, set off a few more rockets or TNT boxes that blast us off into a canyon or blow up in our face.

Where we are faithless, thank God, Christ is faithful. And He instructs us in the way of God’s Will. He would have had the cup pass if it were possible, but nevertheless, He drank it as was the will of His Father. Christ is the perfect embodiment of this virtue of simplicity and the strength source to draw from in order that we foster the same in ourselves. “The one denominator to which we should bring all things is Christ,” writes von Hildebrand, and “thus will our life receive its inward unity.”7

Ludolph writes, “Confessors of the faith and others also learn from Christ’s life not only to put up with their labors, trials, and infirmities but to do so cheerfully. By virtue of their loving meditation on the life and sufferings of Christ, their souls do not seem to be in their own bodies but in Christ.”8 But here, too, in the meditation upon the life of Christ do we learn the virtue of simplicity and how that in the pursuit thereof, even if it seems like we have been abandoned (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?), possessing God or being possessed by God, we can have certainty that our actions, interior or exterior, are divine, that God is performing them in us, and they are done through Him. Then our actions are godly because they have one and the same origin and goal: God.

I. Introduction

When referring to the virtue of simplicity, I do not necessarily refer to particular external adjustments of one’s life so as to make days and weeks and months and years or systems and organization simpler. I do not aim to give you strategies as to how to be more organized through the use of a Franklin Planner. To quote a monastic named Michael Casey, I’m not here addressing “the elegant simplicity that eschews ordinariness in favor of exotic and expensive minimalism” as may be advertised by various YouTube influencers who live minimalistic, yet expensive lives. I am not going to give arguments why flip phones may be preferable to smart phones or how that through austerity and under-seasoned meals, one can find fulfillment in less flavorful approaches to certain aspects of life.

Rather, to carry through Michael Casey’s thought, I want to address to you “the simplicity of purpose lived out on a daily basis.”1 To use an expression from Dietrich von Hildebrand, I want to encourage you to “the sense of an inward unity of life”2 as you labor as a Christian and in your vocation.

I was first introduced to this notion of simplicity, which I will more fully define in a moment, by accident when I listened to an audio book titled The Practice of the Presence of God. This little book is a series of letters and recorded sayings of a certain Brother Lawrence, a 17th c., French Carmelite monk. I am not sure that Brother Lawrence uses the term ‘simplicity’ in this thin volume, or that, at the time, I knew this was what he was referring to, but the concept is there.

In his Fifth Letter, for example, Brother Lawrence writes, “I know that for the right practice of [the presence of God] the heart must be empty of all other things, because God will possess the heart alone; and as He cannot possess it alone without emptying it of all besides, so neither can He act there, and do in it what He pleases, unless it be left vacant to Him.”3

The vacant heart possessing God alone–or perhaps better to say, possessed by God alone–approaches the virtue of simplicity. But before proceeding to a working definition of simplicity and its hopeful benefits, I want to sketch its opposite. That is, then, as opposed to the vacant heart possessing God or possessed by God alone, the heart that is filled up with other things, surfeited with the cares and the worries of this life; the cares and the worries of being “enough”, so to say, as a Christian; the cares and worries that undermine the aforementioned “inward unity of life” and rather produce a frustrated kind of inward complexity and fragmentation of life.

II. The Weakness of Complexity

In Galatians, St. Paul asks two rhetorical questions: For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? He does not answer the first question with “God’s approval of course” nor does he answer the second question, “Of course not” but simply drives to this conclusion, which supplies the proper answers to both questions: If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

The opposite of simplicity, as I will come to reflect upon it, would be an inward complexity. That is, a divided loyalty or attention or love or expending of oneself that fragments into as many directions as there are objects that you’re trying to serve or please. In Galatians, St. Paul sets man and God in juxtaposition to one another, but inside the former category is a multitude of persons that one would have to please if, in fact, abandoning servanthood to Christ, you sought to please man. If a Christian does this, he begins to undermine and attack the possibility of an inward unity of life.

In a book titled The Strength of Simplicity, the author, late Roman Catholic Bishop (20th c.) in France, Emmanuel de Gibergues, writes of people pleasing, “If you are a slave to public opinion, prejudice, and human respect; if you allow yourself to be led by a word, a glance, or a smile; if you act for the world—you cannot please God.”4

He also warns, however, about less obvious or easier-to-hide motivations that undermine simplicity, such as our own egoistic aims. De Gibergues warns, “In the same way, if you act from egotistical motives, self-love, vain complacency, and personal satisfaction—if, in a word, you take the credit for the good that you do or the virtues you practice—their intrinsic value is lost in God’s sight. ‘You put all into a bag with holes.’”5

He also cautions that acting only out of fear of punishment undermines simplicity, inasmuch as it acts not out of a love for God, but only in regard to escaping His displeasure. But, perhaps a last (though not necessarily a final) consideration of the subtle way simplicity is undermined is laboring with an appeal to the love of God, but really doing so for the purpose of reward. In the end, the Christian should not labor out of fear of punishment or hope of reward, but for Him Who has called you to this new life through His Son, Jesus Christ. That is, then, to learn to love God Himself in the service of God, and nothing besides.

This seems obvious and achievable, but these aforementioned dangers are at every turn, and the subtle shift away from the proper aim or goal of our labor, namely, the love of God, is quite easy to fall prey to.

C. S. Lewis meditates on this subtle shift when considering love of God or God as our aim and goal balanced with loving those dearest to us. Fictionally, he writes about this dilemma in Chapter 11 of The Great Divorce when he sets forth a character, Pam, who comes to the border of the new country of heaven, and is only interested in entering if her late son, Michael, is there. She is met by her brother Reginald, and their interaction proceeds, in part, this way:

Reginald says, “I know you expected someone else.” The “someone else” was Michael. And, she immediately answers, “I did think Michael would have come. He is here, of course?” Reginald warns Pam of what in her needs to be corrected; that is, she desires to be in this new country merely for the sake of being with her son again, seeing God as a means to Michael as opposed to seeing Michael as a gracious by-product, a gracious gift from God Who is to be all in all.

To see Michael, Pam says, “I’ll do whatever is necessary. What do you want me to do? Come on. The sooner I begin it, the sooner they’ll let me see my boy. I’m quite ready.” Reginald answers, “But, Pam, do think! Don’t you see you are not beginning at all as long as you are in that state of mind? You’re treating God only as a means to Michael. But [entering] consists in learning to want God for His own sake.” And their conversation concludes with Pam making a demand:

“Give me my boy. Do you hear? I don’t care about all your rules and regulations. I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one had a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, forever and ever.”

Reginald answered, “He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way.” Not that way, meaning, the way of using God as a means to other ends that it turns out we love more than God Himself. Her fate is left indeterminate, but there is a warning in this chapter that such affectionate love as that of a mother for a son can often cause one to subtly displace God as the end or goal for means to certain other ends that we love more.

Lewis discovered this in his own life as he struggled with the death of his wife, Joy. They had been married late in life and only for three years before she died of cancer. He wrestles with her death in A Grief Observed. At one point he writes,

“Am I just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to [my late wife], it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that [God] can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as the means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what [is] really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an end of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End.” (68).

So, back to the labor of the Christian and the potential and often subtle pitfalls that shift the end or aim or goal or intention of our labor from the love of God and God Himself, to other such things that undermine and, finally destroy the possibility of simplicity, let us be on our guard. In the problem described by C. S. Lewis, the outcome is the possible loss of God entirely for love, not of Him, but of Him so long as He gives us other things. In the consideration of the Christian life, where God ceases to be our aim, the same outcome may result. However, before this, the weakness of an inward fragmented complexity will, at the very least, cause us to lose the possibility of the inward unity of life and, therefore, the possibility of peace as we labor.

To be continued.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, he writes the following about Sam Gamgee: “Sam knew the land well within twenty miles of Hobbiton, but that was the limit of his geography.” The limit of his geography meant that, as the weather became more inclement toward the beginning of their travels out of the Shire, Sam knew of a place they could take shelter. ‘“If we get to the other side of this hill, we shall find a spot that is sheltered and snug enough, sir. There is dry fir-wood just ahead, if I remember rightly.’”1 Thus, there is not a sense that this “limit of his geography” was a mark against Sam, even if it highlights his ignorance in regard to what sprawls beyond the the borders of Hobbiton. However, the ignorance in regard to what lies beyond the limit of one’s geography is no more an indictment than the limit itself. It simply reflects one’s own individuated limitations, which are good, as they are framed for him by God.

Until Gandalf caught Sam eavesdropping on his conversation with Frodo about the Ring and the coming darkness, Sam really had no reason to think about the world beyond Hobbiton (though he was very interested in the elves). As a gardener, he was familiar enough with limits, with careful attention to particular plots of earth, for none are more so than those whose work draws life from the earth.

And, though Gandalf draws Sam into the fate of the Ring’s destruction, he is reassigned a new limit, however far beyond the boundary of Hobbiton it took him. Sam’s new limit was to stay with his master, Frodo.

“Don’t you leave him! they said to me. Leave him! I said. I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon, and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they’ll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with, I said.”2

Thus, when Frodo volunteers to take the Ring to Mordor, Sam finally pipes up,

‘But you won’t send him off alone surely, Master?’ cried Sam, unable to contain himself any longer, and jumping up from the corner where he had been quietly sitting on the floor.

‘No, indeed!’ said Elrond, turning towards him with a smile. ‘You at least shall go with him. It is hardly possible to separate you from him, even when he is summoned to a secret council and you are not.’3

With Don’t you leave him ringing in his ears, Sam courageously accepted his new limit as “Wherever Frodo is, there I shall be also.” He also strove forward within the limit of his role, not as the Ring bearer, but as the bearer up of the Ring bearer. A limit of place and role, as it is for us all.

Many see limits as restrictive. And, in some sense, limits are restrictive. But, not in the way some imagine when using the descriptor restrictive as a pejorative to describe our boundedness. Man needs limits precisely because he is not an unlimited, infinite creature. It is, perhaps, not enough to say that man needs limits, and better to say limits or boundaries are simply an aspect of life in this created world. God set limits for the sea, for example (Prov. 8:29; Job 38:10). He gives a particular place to all that He has made, from the luminaries in the heavens to the holy angels to the earth worms. And, thank God it is so.

Limits create divisions and divisions maintain shape and order. A river runs within the bounds of its banks and is defined as a river precisely in view of such limits. To attempt to live outside limits is best illustrated by a river during spring run off. A river does not become more itself when, exceeding the high water mark, it rises above and beyond its banks. In that case, it loses its shape and distinction as a river, and becomes destructive besides.

Each must be satisfied with his own sphere, his own place, his own limit and love to live within it, whether it is a garden bed or on a campaign to defend peace and order or in a home supporting Homeliness or in an occupation of whatever sort. For in every occupation faithfully fulfilled, humble or grand, God is at work for some good.

Thus Elrond reflects,

‘Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them.’4

Let it then be said of each one that he knows well the things within the limit of his own geography, his place and his role, being without distraction by those things that do not concern him, unless by a change of boundary they become his responsibility. For like a bird that wanders from its nest Is a man who wanders from his place (Prov. 27:8).

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